What’s the biggest challenge the Democrat Party faces? Trump bashing is the easy part, thanks in no small measure to Donald Trump himself. Harder yet will be winning back voters who have slid over to the GOP, in large part due to President Trump. Trump won 62% of the vote among white voters without a college degree and who make less than $30,000 a year, reports John Fund in NRO.
Asked which party will “improve the economy and create jobs,” Republicans have a 35-point edge among white working-class Democrats. They have a 19-point edge when it comes to ensuring people are rewarded for their hard work, and a 15-point edge on middle-class tax cuts. Democrats have only a four-point edge on health care, a surprise given the unpopularity of the GOP’s failed Senate plan.
The next problem is trickier. Democrats will not win back those voters without concealing their progressive agenda of identity politics, job-killing environmentalism, and expansion of the welfare state. No easy task. Democrats can come up with whatever slogans they like, but until they deliver on “Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future,” the WSJ points out, they will continue to fail.
Joel Kotkin, a demographer and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism, told Fund in an interview, “We are seeing an ongoing class war by liberal elites against the middle and working classes.”
As a reader of the WSJ writes,
The Trump vote was a choice between quick structural change and hoping that Washington elites, special interests, pompous politicians and Democratic coastal leaders one day return our nation to its rightful owners. The choice was easy.
People are realizing the Democratic programs are antiquated and that their Democratic representatives are financially tied to the programs. Parents of children in failing schools witness their representatives, funded by the teachers unions, fighting desperately to resist charter schools or voucher programs (meanwhile demand for charter school seats in New York City is three times the available seats). Coal miners hear the Democratic Party leadership, beholden to the cult of environmentalism, bragging about eliminating their industry and their jobs.
Read more from John Fund here.
